Water experiments... 12.31.16

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Another post in the water sub series in the main off the grid series of posts.

I wanted to try to make a good activated charcoal straw filter, and then use that to clean up some water that came from my sand filter.  Results were disappointing.  Although the straw filter will work on really dirty water, it seems to have its limitations.

Not only that, I tried taking that water just filtered, and then running it through the distiller to see what the best water I could get would be with a real sample.  Again, the results were disappointing.  I got the TDS to show 300 or so.  Not really very good.

The distiller isn't working like I think it should.  It seems to get impurities from the heater hose.

The water seemed cleaner, though.  But there wasn't that much of it.  Still having problems with that weak link I mentioned before.  I cannot fix that until I can get to the hardware store, and that won't happen until I feel better than I do now.

This time last year

Actually, I started to do a year in review type post, but it looks too complex.  I looked at posts from the first week of Jan, and that will be a review of sorts.

One thing I was doing was New Year's resolutions.  One resolution was to promote the blog.  That one didn't get kept.  Another was to take care of my health better.  This one was kept for almost the whole year.  However, at the end, I seemed to have reverted to some old ways.  For instance, I had lost at one time, nearly 33 lbs.  Now I have gained about five pounds of it back.

This past year was the lightest blogging since I blogged full time.  Less than a thousand posts this past year.  At the peak in 2011, I did 2500.

Audience numbers are up, but I am skeptical of that.  This is still pretty much an obscure little outpost on the web.

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People don't want to hear negative things, even if it is constructive criticism.  You have to be "nice" these days.



It is the sign of the times.



How do you make people be good?  You cannot.  It is something they have to want for themselves.

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No knock here on Palin.  Just want to say one thing... these things don't tell you anything useful.  For example, Hillary is number one all those years, but does that make her fit for the office of President of the United States?



I am having trouble with a doctor's office that is supposedly highly rated.  I am wondering whether these ratings really tell you anything useful.  That is all.

A comprehensive system? Maybe.

This post will fit into my  off-the-grid series of posts.  It will be classified under the general subcategory, or subseries.  It can read end to end by following the links, or the entire series can be accessed through the table of contents post.

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I want to tie together a few posts in order to show how this can fit together into a neat plan.

First of all, the last few posts show how one can transport hydrogen safely from one spot to another with a solid material, such as smelling salts.  Smelling salts are relatively safe, certainly safer than fossil fuels, if you want to compare.  Also safer than transporting plain old ammonia.

You can also use the smelling salts to obtain fresh water, or to recycle dirty water.  My plan is to use only five gallons of water daily, of which I wish to keep at least fifty percent of it, so as to only need to replace it with a couple gallons of fresh water daily.  This is obtainable from a fuel cell system that could be purchased from a company I contacted not that long ago.

Sure, you can make hydrogen out of smelling salts.  But you still need the ammonia to make the smelling salts.  You can get that from a nuclear power source, such as a molten salt reactor.

A plant to make smelling salts using a molten salt reactor could be a killer app for both fuel cell cars and molten salt reactors.

A thought for the night!

As for me, I'd like my own little moonshot to work, but I have to get well first.

That's a whole 'nother problem.

Solve for X: Rob McGinnis on global water scarcity ( reposted from 2012)

note:

Smelling salts can desalinate water and be a source of ammonia for a fuel cell, that produces even more water and electricity.

Now all you need is to separate the ammonia from the carbon dioxide.  There's a way...

the original post follows immediately...



Update:

Some background info from Business Week.

Back of the envelope calc for fuel cell production

Let's say you had a fuel cell that could produce 3.5 kwh continuously.  If you ran it for five hours, that would produce 17.5 kwh of power.  Plenty enough to run a household.

The amount of hydrogen needed for that could be about a kilogram.  The reason for that assumption is that a fuel cell vehicle can get about 60 miles on a kilogram of hydrogen.

An electric car can go about 4 miles on a kwh of electricity.  For a Tesla, that's about 50 kwh for a vehicle for 200 mile range.

So, roughly about the same as above: 15 kwh of electricity gets you about as much as a kilogram of hydrogen from a fuel cell.

So, the above fuel cell could use about one kilogram, as stated.

It takes about nine kilograms of water to produce the hydrogen for one kilogram hydrogen.

That's about twenty pounds of water, or about two and half gallons of water.  The fuel cell would produce not only electricity, but two and a half gallons of drinking quality water.

Now for the interesting part:  It would take about one and a third pounds of smelling salts to yield a pound of water.  That means that twenty pound of water would require about twenty six or a little more of smelling salts.

The smelling salts could be broken down to ammonia and carbon dioxide.  The ammonia can break down to hydrogen for the fuel cell.

The tech exists that could do all that.  Economics?  Not sure, but there's an outfit that can make the ammonia cracker and of course there's companies that make smelling salts.  The last piece is to collect the ammonia from the smelling salts.

I think it is all feasible.